Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Combat stress takes its toll

They identified the shooter who killed his comrades at the US army base in Iraq. His identity isn't important so much as the fact that he was on his third deployment to Iraq, and his commanders had already taken away his gun because he was exhibiting signs of stress. If they had sent him home sooner, maybe those 5 soldiers he killed would still be alive. Suicide rates are up too.

In a way, these repeated deployments are a form of torture of our own troops.

3 Comments:

Aside from the terrible impact this will have on the families of those 5 soldiers, the impact it will have on the soldier who did the killing is hard to bear too.

Our soldiers are so stressed out that they're killing each other. This is very serious and should have us rethinking the state of warfare for generations to come. Somehow I sort of doubt that will happen.

Here's a bit of grim irony - after Viet Nam, the military determined that a contributing factor to higher PTSD cases and suicides was the one year deployments in a combat zone - which is why the military adopted the 6 month deployment schedule.Unfortunately, they failed to consider what to do if we were involved in more areas of conflict than we had soldiers to support.The solution? Deploy soldiers for 6 months intervals, but don't limit the number of times they could be deployed...hmmmm, that bit of logic is working just great isn't it.